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In a windfall for
Central Government employees, the 7th Pay Commission has recommended a hike of
23.55 per cent in salary and allowances which will entail an expenditure of
Rs1.02 lakh crore on the government.

Justice AK Mathur
submitted the 7th Pay Commission report to Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today.
The Central Government constitutes the pay commission every 10 years to revise
the pay scale of its employees. The Union Cabinet had extended the term of the panel
in August by four months, till December. The 6th Pay Commission was implemented
with effect from January 1, 2006.

The Finance Minister
said the government would look into the report before its implementation.

The report has
implications for 47 lakh employees of the Central Government and 52 lakh
pensioners.

While the impact on
the fiscal deficit will be 0.65 per cent, putting strain on government
finances, analysts say the pay panel bonanza will lift consumption in the
economy with increased spending on automobiles, consumer durables, real estate
and discretionary items. The minimum pay in the government is recommended to be
set at Rs 18,000 per month. The maximum pay has been set at Rs 2.25 lakh per
month for apex scale and Rs 2.50 lakh per month for Cabinet Secretary and
others at the same level.

The recommended date
of implementation is January 1, 2016. The total financial impact for 2016-17 is
likely to be Rs 1.02 lakh crore over the expenditure.

The impact on the
fiscal side entails an increase of 0.65 per cent points in the ratio of
expenditure on to the GDP compared to 0.77 per cent in case of the 6th Pay
Commission.

Of the total
financial impact of Rs 1.02 lakh crore, Rs 73,650 crore will be borne by the
General Budget and Rs 28,450 crore by the Railway Budget. A new pay structure
has been recommended by the commission. The report says in light of the issues
raised regarding the grade pay structure and with a view to bring in greater
transparency, the present system of pay bands and grade pay has been dispensed
with and a new pay matrix has been designed. Grade pay has been subsumed in the
pay matrix. The status of the employee, which was earlier determined by grade
pay, will now be determined by the level in the pay matrix.

The rate of annual
increment is being retained at 3 per cent. The report has made the performance
benchmarks for MACP more stringent from “good” to “very good”.

The commission
proposes against grant of annual increments in case of those employees who are
unable to meet the benchmark either for MACP or for a regular promotion in the
first 20 years of their service. The Military Service Pay, which is a
compensation for the various aspects of military service, will be admissible to
the defence force personnel only. As before, Military Service Pay will be
payable to all ranks up to and inclusive of Brigadiers and their equivalents.

Short Service
Commissioned Officers will be allowed to exit the Armed Forces at any point in
time between seven and 10 years of service, with a terminal gratuity equivalent
of 10.5 months of reckonable emoluments. They will further be entitled to a
fully funded one year executive programme or an MTech programme at a premier
institute.

The commission has
recommended a revised formulation for lateral entry and resettlement of defence
force personnel, which keeps in view the specific requirements of organisation
to which such personnel will be absorbed. The panel has recommended abolishing
52 allowances altogether. Another 36 allowances have been abolished as separate
identities, but subsumed either in an existing allowance or in newly proposed
allowances. Allowances relating to risk and hardship will be governed by the
proposed risk and hardship matrix.

India and China
today agreed to form a ministerial-level mechanism headed by their home
ministers for the first time to step up cooperation and coordination on a host
of security-related issues, including cross-border terrorism, smuggling and
drug trafficking.

The decision to form
the ministerial mechanism was agreed upon after Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s
talks here with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and Interior Minister Guo Shengkun.

The ministerial
mechanism, which would be followed by a comprehensive Memorandum of
Understanding (MoU) on the security-related issues to be worked out, will
become operational during Guo’s visit to India next year, Singh told the media
here after his meetings with Li and Guo.

The committee will
handle issues like terrorism, security and law enforcement related issues,
trans-border crimes, cyber crimes and drug trafficking. “From now onwards all
the issues will be handled by the committee, co-chaired by both the home
ministers,” he said. The committee will meet every year to review the progress,
Singh said.

“There is a common recognition
by both sides that terrorism is a common threat. It is a transnational and
transborder threat which requires our joint response,” he said, adding that the
point was also highlighted in talks with Li. The decision by the two countries
to deepen cooperation relating to terrorism comes in the backdrop of the Paris
terrorist attacks and killing of Chinese and Norwegian hostages by Islamic
State terrorists.

“In principle we have agreed to
a new bilateral document which will provide the contours of cooperation in
counter terrorism, security, trans-border crimes and related issues,” Singh
said. — PTI

Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar was among
hundreds of people who converged on a small village in Satara, Maharashtra, as
the mortal remains of Colonel Santosh Mahadik were consigned to flames with
full military honours

The 39-year-old martyr laid down his life
battling militants near LoC in north Kashmir’s Kupwara district. He is
survivied by wife and two children, who were present during the cremation

An officer from the elite 21 Para-Special
Forces unit, Col Mahadik was awarded a Sena Medal for gallantry during
Operation Rhino in the North-East in 2003

New Delhi:There were meant to be the eyes and ears of
the Indian Army - a state of the art unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) meant to
give Army commanders high definition images of a battlefield, help designate
targets, and provide Electronic and Signal Intelligence information.

Instead, the
home-grown Nishant UAV, developed by the Defence Research and Development
Organisation (DRDO) is a flop with all four aircraft in service with the Indian
Army having crashed. And now, the Army has had enough. They want no more
Nishant drones from the DRDO. Each drone had cost the Army Rs. 22 crore.

The last of the four
Nishants in service with the Army went down near the Pokhran range in Rajasthan
today. According to Army sources, "Today's crash is due to a technical glitch."
Just 15 days back, another Nishant had gone down, also for a technical reason.
Earlier in April, two other Nishant drones had crash landed near the
India-Pakistan border near Jaisalmer.

Under development
for two decades, the Nishant, designed to fly for four and a half hours, was
first inducted into the Indian Army in 2011 after successfully completing
confirmatory trials. Launched by a catapult system, the Nishant is recovered
after it deploys a parachute at the end of the each mission.

For their part, the
DRDO has blamed the user for poor handling of the system, a point categorically
denied by the Army.

The DRDO was banking
on the success of the Nishant drone and was also developed a wheeled version of
the system called the Panchi. The future of this programme now remains unclear.

India's armed forces
uses a variety of UAVs including Israeli built Heron and Searcher aircraft
which are larger and significantly more capable that the Nishant in its present
state of development. A smaller drone, called the Nethra which was developed by
graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology is also in use with the forces
and is widely used by police and paramiltiary forces and the National Disaster
Relief Force.

A top Army commander
said on Thursday that there was a “possibility” that global terror outfit
Islamic State (IS) may join hands with Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba to launch
attacks in India.

“Yes, that (IS joining hands
with LeT to launch attacks in India) can be a possibility as the motive of the
terrorists is to spread their propaganda.

“They want their name and for
that, they can do anything. And if they get successful, they can take advantage
of it by using any name. Yes it is a possibility,” General Officer Commanding
of the 16 corps of the army Lt Gen RR Nimbhorkar told reporters here today.

Indian Army Soldiers
In Siachen To Don New Improved 'Made In India' Clothing Soon

The Army is now
trying to upgrade as well as indigenise specialised extreme winter clothing for
its soldiers deployed in "super high-altitude" areas like the Siachen
Glacier-Saltoro Ridge region, which have to be imported from countries like
Switzerland, Finland and Norway in large numbers at high costs year after year.

It takes around Rs 1
lakh to clothe a single soldier for the forbidding Siachen heights, which range
from 16,000 to 22,000-feet. Other basic gear like ice-axes, shovels, boot
crampons, Stromeyer tents and the like are also being largely imported ever
since Indian jawans took most of the "dominating" glacial heights on
the Saltoro Ridge in a daring operation to pre-empt Pakistani soldiers by a
whisker in 1984.

Sources say the Army
has now asked the defence ministry to go in for clothing procurements for super
high-altitude deployments in Siachen, Drass, Kargil, Sikkim and Arunachal —
which are over 16,000-feet with temperatures ranging from minus 10 to 50-60 degree
Celsius — for five years at one go.

"There are
eight major clothing items still being procured from abroad. At present,
specialised clothing for over 27,000 soldiers is procured for three years at a
time. But since the process is long, with complaints of irregularities often
further slowing it down, it would be better to buy for five years at a
time," said a source.

Concomitantly,
attempts are also being made in conjunction with the Indian Technical Textile
Association to "tap the technology available within the country" to
gradually replace imported winter clothing. Questions, after all, are often
raised why a country developing inter-continental ballistic missiles and
nuclear submarines, remains incapable of making specialised ECCWS (extreme cold
climate weather suit) and gear for its soldiers. For starters, the two items
"being indigenised" are rucksacks and thermal insoles, which are
currently imported from Norway. "Samples by Indian vendors will soon be
sent for winter trials. If they pass, orders will be placed," said the
source.

Similarly, Indian
vendors have been identified for making the three-layered ECCWS and gloves as
well as the four-layered socks. "The overall aim is to improve the
products further by reducing bulk and weight to ensure soldiers can be more
agile and combat-effective while getting higher thermal insulation from the
extreme weather," he said.

Just since 1984,
India has lost around 900 soldiers on the Siachen heights. But with better
infrastructure being built on the glacial heights, where soldiers are taught to
"survive first and then fight", the number of casualties has gone
down over the years.

But soldiers still
have to constantly battle high-altitude pulmonary odema, cerebral odema,
hypothermia, hypoxia and frost-bite in the extremely tough terrain, where
avalanches, blizzards and "white-outs" are the norm. Just last week,
an Army doctor, Capt Ashwini Kumar, was killed after a patrol got hit by an
avalanche in Siachen.